Re: TaskmasterYeah, I'm hoping it should be a fun show to see recorded. There's two recordings a day, one at 4ish and one at 7:30 I think, so that gives them about a 3 hour window to get the audience in, do the show and get the audience out again so I think it will be about 2 hours maybe.

I'll let you guys know what it's like although I'd have thought, and I hope, that it will be very similar to the final TV show except a bit longer!

Re: TaskmasterWell, I had a long old drive down to London yesterday and, after a brief delay digging through a service station bin full of old KFC after I somehow managed to drop my wedding ring into it, we made it to Pinewood Studios.

I won't spoil anything specific for when it gets shown but there isn't a great deal more to share!

We got into the studio at about 4:30-5ish, we were sat up on the balcony as there are actually only a couple of rows on ground level, as well as about 12 people on each side in the 'boxes'. Even the row furthest away from the stage up in the balcony is a lot closer to the stage than it appears on screen so I don't think anyone had a bad view.

Mark Olver was the warmup, I've seen him on other things and he was great, after about 20 mins or so he introduced Greg Davies and Alex Horne who came on and did a bit of a chat for/with the audience. Very soon after Greg introduced the 5 contestants who took their seats.

From this point on, the whole process was really slick I have to say. If you imagine how an episode of Taskmaster would be without a time limit, that was how the recording works. The contestants introduced their 'prizes' for that episode at some length so I feel that section especially will get chopped down a lot in the edit. The pre-recorded tasks were already edited to how they will appear in the final show and they basically just worked through the whole show without really stopping. They would introduce the task, go straight into the VT and as soon as it was over they would discuss with the contestants.

The only real stop was to set up for the live task on the stage, they can't have it set up in advance because the big screen at the front of the stage is projected onto from the back of the stage, so anything on stage would cast a shadow onto the screen. Even so, it probably only took about 10 minutes to set that up, move the cameras and clear the chairs. After that it was straight back into it, no messing around.

The live task was the oddest part of the recording for me, the task itself was more of a slower, thinking task so nobody was really cheering encouragement to begin with and there is no music played in the actual studio during, so at first it was taking place in almost complete silence. Things busied up towards the end but it was a slightly strange thing to witness!

Greg and Alex had to do a few re-records on the Autocue for bits they hadn't got quite right first time around, after which it was all done! We were leaving the studio at 7:30 so in all we were in the building for about 2:30-3hrs, probably 2 hours of which was the actual recording.

I liked the new cast as a whole, Tim Vine was good in the tasks although was relatively quiet in the actual studio but was very funny when he did get a turn to speak. Russell, Asim and Alice seemed to dominate the conversation a little but they may well balance that out in the edit. It felt even from just one episode that there is one person who seems like they will do well over the whole series and one person who will do badly over the whole series!

Most importantly it was very funny, I'm not sure I'd be rushing back just because of the journey time for me but as a recording experience I thought it was brilliant, really slick, not much waiting around for the audience and lots to see.